Israel’s Egregious Plan for Gaza & the New Silk Road (Part 1 of 2)

Israel’s Egregious Plan for Gaza & the New Silk Road (Part 1 of 2)

This is a decisive moment, and not just for Palestine, because the victors will end up drawing the new map of the world to come …

By: Dan Asmussen

A few weeks before the October 7th “attack” on Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu held up a map  at the United Nations General Assembly and declared an Israeli plan for the “New Middle East”. He then used a red marker to draw a line between the Arabian Sea and the tip of Italy in the Mediterranean—referring to the economic corridor that stretches between India to the United Arab Emirates, through Saudi Arabia, into Jordan, Israel, then finally to the entire European continent.

The map did not include the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or Gaza. These Palestinian territories have been illegally occupied by Israel since 1967, with the exception of Gaza—from which Israeli forces withdrew in 2005, while maintaining an economic stranglehold over the densely populated coastal strip.

Netanyahu also held up a map of “Israel in 1948″—the year the modern Jewish state was established, largely through the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Arabs—that erroneously included the Palestinian territories as part of Israel.

“No greater insult to every foundational principle of the UN than seeing Netanyahu display before the UNGA a “map of Israel” that straddles the entire land from the river to the sea,” the Palestinian Authority’s representative to Germany Laith Arafeh posted on X, formerly Twitter.

With this map Netanyahu negates “Palestine and its people” while “attempting to spin the audience with rhetoric about “peace” in the region, all the while entrenching the longest ongoing belligerent occupation in today’s world,” Arafeh said.

Over the last few years, the influence of the United States in this part of the world has started to fade, and now that they’ve stolen 300 billion dollars from Russia, the relevance of the dollar is starting to recede to the point where now you’ve got all these suits in Washington and Tel Aviv running around desperately trying to counter China’s new “Silk Road”—and this map, courtesy of Netanyahu is their answer.

This is the rival to China’s new Silk Road.

The ancient Silk Road is the largest most important trade route in human history. It stretches all the way from China, to Syria, to the Mediterranean Sea. The Chinese know how important it is, and they want to revive it. It is the future of world economics, trade, and politics.

So far this year, Iran and Iraq have signed a joint railway deal, and President Assad of Syria has signed a strategic partnership with China (the world’s largest economy), giving the new Silk Road corridor rail access all the way from China to the Mediterranean Sea, through Syria’s port in Latakia. This doesn’t just include the land, but maritime trade as well.

This is crucial—and as enormous and important as all of this is, this is just one aspect. You still have the gas. How can we talk about the Middle East without talking about gas and oil?

When the U. S. instigated the Maidan coup in 2014, it wasn’t just about NATO expansion and encirclement of Russia. This was about surrounding, controlling and cutting off Russian gas to Europe. Remember, Russia is the country with the largest proven reserves of natural gas. If you control Ukraine, you control the pipelines that feed and supply Russian gas to Europe.

For decades you’ve had U.S. politicians, Republican and Democrat from every administration openly saying on camera “We don’t want Nord Stream”.

“You want to have pipelines that don’t go through Ukraine and Russia. For years we’ve tried to get the Europeans to be interested in different pipeline routes, it’s time to do that. You want to depend more on the North American energy platform, the tremendous bounty of oil and gas that we’re finding in North America.” — Condoleeza Rice in 2014

Lo and behold, on 26 September 2022, Nord Stream 1 and 2 were clandestinely “blown up”.

This was without question most egregious, and the largest terrorist attack on European infrastructure in modern history. There are only three countries on this planet who could pull this off—they are Russia, Britain, and the United States, and let me tell you, it was not Russia. Combine this with the sanction packages from the European Union banning Russian oil and gas and just like that, the United States has conveniently achieved a long-standing foreign policy objective.

Now, the only other country with enormous gas reserves (the second largest in the world) is Iran.

When Iran signed a nuclear deal in 2015 they were complying in every way imaginable—and the IAEA couldn’t have been happier. Then the United States who orchestrated the whole deal, went back on their word, and reimposed sanctions on Iran. So now Iran is barred from selling its oil and gas to Europe, and the two countries with the largest gas reserves are now out of the picture.

Then in a stroke of unprecedented luck and perfect timing, Israel all of a sudden proposed themselves as the solution to the European Union’s gas shortages.

“Take our trilateral energy agreement for example that we closed in June, with Egypt and Israel. It has played an important role in our strategy to get rid of the Russian fossil fuels.” — Ursula von der Leyen President of the European Union.

How convenient.

In 2010, a Geological Survey discovered a vast natural gas field located in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Israel between Lebanon and Syria. It is deep in the Levantine Basin, an area rich in hydrocarbons. The field is roughly 130 kilometers west of Haifa and 1,500 meters deep. It was named “Leviathan”, and is estimated to hold over 21 trillion cubic feet of natural gas—enough to fill Israeli power-generation needs for the next 40 years while still leaving ample supply for export.

Syria initially declined offers over its gas reserves and simultaneously refused to lay pipes for the Qatari Gas Project. Coincidently and barely a year later, war breaks out in Syria, while Qatar, Israel, and the United States are just some of the parties funding and running this war to overthrow the government in Damascus.

Today, the United States controls one-third of Syria, and all of its oil fields while Israel is bombing Syria’s most vital port in Latakia on a regular basis—simultaneously cutting off the oil revenue, while destroying and crippling any maritime activity such as trade and gas exploration.

Soon after the massive explosion which destroyed the maritime port in Beirut in August of 2020, Israel (proposing itself as a solution to Europe’s gas shortages) just happened to show up with an FPSO (an enormous gas extraction vessel) and attempted to steal gas from Lebanon’s Karish gas field. This reignited a huge maritime border dispute that the United States had to go in and solve diplomatically, because Hezbollah told Israel “if you steal one cubic inch of our gas, we will fire our missiles on your ship.”

Now we come to Gaza, which has its own unexplored gas fields. Gaza is also a concentration camp run by the Israelis, and it’s been under siege by Egypt and Israel under naval blockade since 2007. You can’t even fish properly, let alone extract gas. So now the Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian ports are all out of action, and the only working port left on the coast is the Israeli port on Haifa.

This makes Israel the only one able to explore gas and implement an economic corridor, like the one Netanyahu held up at the UN. In other words, Israel and the United States together killed off all the competition, stole their goods, and cornered the market—and now that winter is approaching Israel desperately needs to get that gas for Europe—but there’s no stability in the region without solving the Palestinian question. So when Netanyahu showed up at the U.N. with his “brilliant plan”, the Israelis thought it was a done deal—they’ll just get Saudi Arabia to normalize ties, and thereby extinguishing the Palestinian issue once and for all.

And that is precisely why they are in Gaza slaughtering Palestinians by the thousands, surpassing anything we have ever seen before. Israel is just hoping the Palestinians will run away in fear into the desert. They’ve literally said they want the people in Gaza to go to the Sinai Desert, and they want to push the people in the West Bank into Jordan.

This is genocide and ethnic cleansing without question—but it also has economic and geopolitical implications.

When Hamas and the collective resistance found out about Israel’s plan, and Saudi Arabia’s wishes to normalize ties with Israel (which would destroy any hope of a Palestinian state), it forced their hand. It became clear they needed to act and respond immediately, lest Palestine be lost forever.

For Palestinians, this is, and always has been a matter of life and death. To be or not to be.

Either the resistance axis and the global south expel the American and Israeli colonizers from the Middle East, or Israel and the United States will continue occupying the region, choking off the New Silk Road, plundering Syria’s oil, and keeping Russian, Iranian, and Arab gas cut off from the word market.

This is a decisive moment, and not just for Palestine, because the victors will end up drawing the new map of the world to come.

Coming up in Part 2: The Ben Gurion Canal

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Also by Dan:

Saving Gaza Means Saving The World

ISRAEL: The State That “Has The Right To Defend Itself” From Unarmed Women & Children

The Balfour Declaration: Enduring Ethnic Criminality

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More about the articles Author: Dan Asmussen is the Director of Membership & Community for TLBTalk.com and has been a TLB Project content contributor for well over a decade.

Image Credit: Flags in articles Featured Image (top) – Pixabay license. In-article image – “Benjamin Netanyahu Israel vs. Palestine” by AK Rockefeller is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. & “Photograph – Group Portrait, Gaza, Palestine, World War II, 1939-1943” (cropped) by Unknown photographer is marked with Public Domain.

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